With the evolution of computer technology, communications technology, and various other multimedia transmission technologies, manners of providing information become increasingly diverse. Therefore, an information provider (such as an advertiser, a news provider, a manufacturer, etc) starts providing information to potential recipients in various manners, for example, publishing information to the public via a computer network, television network, a broadcast network, etc.; sending emails, MMS (Multi-media Message Service), and SMS (Short Message Service) to a particular recipient; and offering phone promotion directly via a fixed phone or a mobile phone. Common recipients start focusing on how to manage various information which they have received and recommend useful information to other people who can require such information.
For common recipients of information, they generally recommend information to other people manually. For example, a user receives an email from other users via the Internet, while this email comprises information about IBM software products. When the user intends to provide information about these new products to other friends, he/she usually needs to select email addresses of other users from the contact list to forward this email to the desired users. If the same user finds a technical article about an IBM hardware product published or forwarded by a certain user in a social website, the user can opt to repost the technical article about the IBM hardware product to different users within the social website, or opt to repost it to all other users.
Accordingly, a user can receive information in various manners, while the user can further recommend information to other users in a manner identical to or different from the manner in which he or she receives the information. Managing the recommended information manually is a time-consuming and complex work, and the user has to consider various aspects of factors: to whom the information is provided, what information to be provided, how to provide the information, whether to initiatively search information of other user's interest based on their preferences, etc. For a user who reads little information every day and has a few friends, manually recommending information can be realistic. However, when the user is within a gigantic social network and faces a considerable amount of information every day, it can become unfeasible to recommend information to other people manually.
In a real world, a user can have multiple aspects of attribute such as age, gender, address, graduate school, occupation, hobbies, etc., which will affect the types of information of the user's interest. The user further intends to provide information to other users in a plurality of manners (such as via the internal message within the website, email, SMS, instant message, MMS, paging service, and even directly using voice telephone).
There is a proposed a solution which can facilitate sharing of particular information from one user to other users (for example, through “group”), in which a user can quickly share some information he/she has accessed to other users in a group where he/she is in. Additionally, the user can participate in a plurality of groups across a plurality of social websites, or intend to recommend information to users in the plurality of groups. Those skilled in the art can know that groups are provided with respect to a particular social website, and the basis for sharing information between users in a group is that these users are registered users of the same social website (for example, a web community or an instant messenger, etc.), so that they can share group services provided by the social website.